I know how dutiful you all are about your health and I'm sure many of you will do the responsible thing and drink beer for your bones.
A new study suggests that beer is a significant source of dietary silicon, a key ingredient for increasing bone mineral density. Researchers from the Department of Food Science & Technology at the University of California, Davis studied commercial beer production to determine the relationship between beer production methods and the resulting silicon content, concluding that beer is a rich source of dietary silicon. Details of this study are available in the February issue of the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Society of Chemical Industry.
"The factors in brewing that influence silicon levels in beer have not been extensively studied" said Charles Bamforth, lead author of the study. "We have examined a wide range of beer styles for their silicon content and have also studied the impact of raw materials and the brewing process on the quantities of silicon that enter wort and beer."
Silicon is present in beer in the soluble form of orthosilicic acid (OSA), which yields 50% bioavailability, making beer a major contributor to silicon intake in the Western diet. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), dietary silicon (Si), as soluble OSA, may be important for the growth and development of bone and connective tissue, and beer appears to be a major contributor to Si intake. Based on these findings, some studies suggest moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis, a disease of the skeletal system characterized by low bone mass and deterioration of bone tissue.
They tested 100 commercial beers. Anyone have access to this journal and wants to tell us which beers are best?
The lighter beers are better.
The researchers examined a variety of raw material samples and found little change in the silicon content of barley during the malting process. The majority of the silicon in barley is in the husk, which is not affected greatly during malting. The malts with the higher silicon contents are pale colored which have less heat stress during the malting process. The darker products, such as the chocolate, roasted barley and black malt, all have substantial roasting and much lower silicon contents than the other malts for reasons that are not yet known.
Partly for the sake of my bones I also take vitamin D, calcium and biweekly high potency vitamin K (as K2 fwiw).
Virgin Group boss and billionaire Richard Branson joins the Peak Oil crowd.
"The next five years will see us face another crunch – the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well," Branson will say.
"Our message to government and businesses is clear: act," he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. "Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did."
One wonders what Branson thinks this means for Virgin Air. Is he still buying airplanes? What's he planning to fuel them with?
Other notable British CEOs join Branson in citing the looming threat.
Other British executives who will support the warning include Ian Marchant, chief executive of Scottish and Southern Energy group, and Brian Souter, chief executive of transport operator Stagecoach.
Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called "peak oil" to avoid panic on the stock markets.
Branson's an optimist compared to Jose S. Gabrielli de Azevedo, CEO of Brazilian oil company Petrobras. Gabrielli doesn't see how world oil production can be maintained at current levels after 2010. Optimists cite offshore Brazilian fields such as Tupi as reasons not to worry about Peak Oil. But Petrobras's ambition to increase production by a couple million barrels won't replace much larger production declines in existing fields around the world. You might want to take your last long road trip fling this year.
I hope Gabrielli is off by a couple of years. I want to do a road trip up the Alaskan Highway thru Canada before oil prices skyrocket.
Update: Lest you think Gabrielli is an outlier among major oil company CEOs, ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva said in 2007 that world oil production will never hit 100 million barrels per day. So we are within at most 15% of world peak.
"Demand will be going up, but it will be constrained by supply," Mulva said. " I don't think we are going to see the supply going over 100 million barrels a day and the reason is: Where is all that going to come from?"
Tell those stem cells to get off their duffs and fix things!
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Northwestern University researchers are the first to design a bioactive nanomaterial that promotes the growth of new cartilage in vivo and without the use of expensive growth factors. Minimally invasive, the therapy activates the bone marrow stem cells and produces natural cartilage. No conventional therapy can do this.
The results will be published online the week of Feb. 1 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
"Unlike bone, cartilage does not grow back, and therefore clinical strategies to regenerate this tissue are of great interest," said Samuel I. Stupp, senior author, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, and Medicine, and director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine. Countless people -- amateur athletes, professional athletes and people whose joints have just worn out -- learn this all too well when they bring their bad knees, shoulders and elbows to an orthopaedic surgeon.
I know people who experience daily pain from worn knee joints. Some started feeling this pain in their 30s. That's a long time to go thru life with a disability that, absent a treatment such as this one, will mean only worsening pain to look forward to.
In an animal model the nanofiber gel with growth factor injected into the injured joint stimulates stem cells to produce the desired type II collagen.
"Our material of nanoscopic fibers stimulates stem cells present in bone marrow to produce cartilage containing type II collagen and repair the damaged joint," Shah said. "A procedure called microfracture is the most common technique currently used by doctors, but it tends to produce a cartilage having predominantly type I collagen which is more like scar tissue."
The Northwestern gel is injected as a liquid to the area of the damaged joint, where it then self-assembles and forms a solid. This extracellular matrix, which mimics what cells usually see, binds by molecular design one of the most important growth factors for the repair and regeneration of cartilage. By keeping the growth factor concentrated and localized, the cartilage cells have the opportunity to regenerate.
Anyone know what the obstacles are to trying this in humans? In the United States is FDA approval needed?
Contrary to conventional belief, as the climate warms and growing seasons lengthen subalpine forests are likely to soak up less carbon dioxide, according to a new University of Colorado at Boulder study.
As a result, more of the greenhouse gas will be left to concentrate in the atmosphere.
"Our findings contradict studies of other ecosystems that conclude longer growing seasons actually increase plant carbon uptake," said Jia Hu, who conducted the research as a graduate student in CU-Boulder's ecology and evolutionary biology department in conjunction with the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
The study will be published in the February edition of the journal Global Change Biology.
Working with ecology and evolutionary biology professor and CIRES Fellow Russell Monson, Hu found that while smaller spring snowpack tended to advance the onset of spring and extend the growing season, it also reduced the amount of water available to forests later in the summer and fall. The water-stressed trees were then less effective in converting CO2 into biomass. Summer rains were unable to make up the difference, Hu said.
While not mentioned in this press release, outright drought is especially problematic for use of trees to capture CO2. Pine needs water in order to produce resin that protects against beetle infestation (yes, trees have active defensive mechanisms against pests). Without enough water pine trees will get killed by beetles. Obviously dead trees release CO2 rather than absorb it. Warmer winters make this problem worse by reducing snow pack and also by not killing the beetles. More beetles survive warmer winters and cause more damage to trees.
While longer seasons and higher CO2 will increase plant growth in many areas that won't happen where drought and reduced summer water run-off makes water a bigger limiting factor than CO2 for plant growth.
Why do I assume CO2 will cause warming? Absorption spectra (and with a decent explanation here and here) I respect physics.
MIT's Technology Review reports on paraffin wax capsules could use the cold of evening to cool rooms in the day.
Building materials that absorb heat during the day and release it at night, eliminating the need for air-conditioning in some climates, will soon be on the market in the United States. The North Carolina company National Gypsum is testing drywall sheets--the plaster panels that make up the walls in most new buildings--containing capsules that absorb heat to passively cool a building. The capsules, made by chemical giant BASF, can be incorporated into a range of construction materials and are already found in some products in Europe.
This won't help much so much where the difference in day and night temperatures is small. But desert areas get very cool at night. So this approach would work well for these areas. What I wonder: Does the paraffin increase the flammability of the walls in a fire?
One could also use a similar approach to make use of lower night rates for electricity. Run an air conditioner or ground sink heat pump at night and use it to cool a compound from liquid to solid phase at night. Then blow home air over the solid during the day to cool it.
Pricing of electricity by time of day and even by level of demand would provide more incentive to implement storage systems for heat and cool. Changes in utility regulatory policies to change electricity pricing based on supply and demand would encourage greater use of materials for storing cool and heat.
More loan guarantees mean more nuclear power plants.
President Obama's proposed 2011 budget could provide a significant boost to the U.S. nuclear power industry, which has been stalled for decades. If approved by Congress, the budget would provide $36 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, opening the way for around seven new nuclear power plants, depending on the final cost of each. The new guarantees are in addition to $18.5 billion in guarantees provided for in a 2005 energy bill.
That's about $5.2 billion per nuke. What I'd like to know: What size of nukes? 1.6 GW each? The US currently has 104 nukes operating and they deliver 20% of the electric power used in the United States. Coal delivers about half the electric power. So we'd need two and a half times the amount of nuclear power added in order to displace dirtier coal electric power.
Nuclear power plants are the most capital intensive way to generate electricity. But they have the lowest fuel costs. Without loan guarantees bond interest rates make nuclear power too expensive to compete with coal and natural for electric power generation.
According to one recent analysis, the cost of building nuclear power plants has approximately doubled in the last seven years (due to things such as increasing materials costs). As it stands, this means that the cost of electricity from new plants would be around 8.4 cents per kilowatt hour, compared to about 6 cents per kilowatt hour for conventional fossil fuel plants.
A 2.4 cent per kwh price gap isn't large. If we had to pay 2.4 cents per kwh more for electricity the effects on our living standards would be pretty small. The existing differences in electricity prices between states are several times larger than that. The people in Connecticut pay about 10 cents more kwh than the people in Minnesota for example. At current prices the people in Connecticut would pay less if all their base load electric power came from nukes. Ditto for the rest of the US northeast.
A major reason for the higher interest rates is that even today new nuclear power plant construction projects in other countries are experiencing unexpected delays. Delays push up total costs because a partially completed plant has a lot of embedded costs without revenue flowing in to pay the interest on bonds.
Loan guarantees are effectively a way for the political system to support nukes with raising prices on nuclear power's dirtier competitors. For nuclear power to grow into a much higher percentage of total electric power generation one or more of of several things need to happen:
- The next round of power plant construction has to go so well that the perceived risk for new nuke construction goes down and therefore interest rates on nuke bonds goes down.
- Manufacture of small nukes on assembly lines substantially lowers the cost of 3rd generation nuclear designs.
- 4th generation nuclear power plants substantially lower the risks and capital requirements for new nuclear power plants.
- Carbon taxes raise the costs of coal and natural gas electricity high enough to make nukes more competitive.
- Regulations on conventional pollutants (e.g. soot and oxides of nitrogen) become much stricter and raise the costs especially of coal electric power.
To put it another way, to make nukes competitive either nuclear power costs need to come down or fossil fuel power costs need to go up. Will either of these developments happen?
“The scope of this is much larger than anybody has every conveyed,” says Kevin Mandia, CEO and president of Virginia-based computer security and forensic firm Mandiant. “There [are] not 50 companies compromised. There are thousands of companies compromised. Actively, right now.”
Mandia claims these intrusions are persistent and used for industrial espionage on a massive scale.
Called Advanced Persistent Threats (APT), the attacks are distinctive in the kinds of data the attackers target, and they are rarely detected by antivirus and intrusion programs. What’s more, the intrusions grab a foothold into a company’s network, sometimes for years, even after a company has discovered them and taken corrective measures.
I do not know whether the threat is this large. Are Chinese hackers really sucking massive amounts of proprietary design and business plan data from American, Japanese, and European corporations?
If the infiltrations really are persistent and on a large scale I have some practical suggestions on how to cut them down by orders of magnitude. Analogies with biological systems come to mind. Biological RNA and DNA viruses can only work because they use the same DNA codon mappings to amino acids. The same 3 letter DNA sequences and RNA sequences map in just about all living organisms on this planet. An organism that used a very different set of mappings would likely be immune to existing viruses.
This description is about to get too technical for most people who aren't computer architects or software developers. Sorry about that.
In computing the problem stems from the universal use of the same operating systems, scripting languages, networking protocols, and CPU op codes. The obvious solution: generate custom instruction set with different orderings of bits in op codes. The same compilers (e.g. gcc) could be used with back-end code generators that would read in tables for how to map to specialized bit orderings of existing processor instruction sets.
Take a microprocessor instruction set like some level of the ARM instruction set. Create a description of an ARM processor in, say, VHDL. Enhance the description so that as instructions get fetched their op code bits will get swapped around from the ordering out in memory to the ordering that the CPU understands. The CPU could execute op codes laid out like any conventional ARM processor. But it could fetch from memory in a secret format which the secret version of the gcc back-end would know how to generate for.
Alternatively, the CPU could execute the secret op code layout. At each site the VHDL (or Verilog or other logic description language) could be transformed into a different unique op code layout. Then the compiled processor architecture could be loaded into an FPGA for execution.
Each super-secure site would generate a different secret bit ordering. The odds of a binary code virus getting into the facility and invading servers would be extremely low because the virus writers wouldn't know how to generate legal op codes.
This same approach could be applied to interpreted scripting languages. Developers could still write and debug in, say, Python or Ruby or Perl. But their source code could be translated into a very different looking interpreted language using a secure (not on a network) computer that would read in, say, Python and split out a different secret scripting language whose interpreter could actually be derived from the open source public Python interpreter engine.
The key to this approach is to develop microprocessor descriptions and interpreted languages that lend themselves to automated transformation into functionally equivalent but different looking instruction execution machines.
In a nutshell: automate the generation of obscure execution languages and op code architectures.
Desktops are a harder nut to crack. One way to do it is to just make desktops as akin to X servers. Run the real word processor, spreadsheet, or browser on the secret server's instruction set architecture. Of course, then Open Office and Mozilla Firefox would need to be compiled for each server. This approach is easier to do with open source.
Painting roofs white in order to cool the planet has been proposed previously. Now some scientists do some computer modeling of the effects of more reflective roofing in cities.
BOULDER—Painting the roofs of buildings white has the potential to significantly cool cities and mitigate some impacts of global warming, a new study indicates. The new NCAR-led research suggests there may be merit to an idea advanced by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu that white roofs can be an important tool to help society adjust to climate change.
But the study team, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), cautions that there are still many hurdles between the concept and actual use of white roofs to counteract rising temperatures.
Whiter buildings in cities are of special interest because cities are warmer (especially in the summer) than surrounding regions. The buildings and roads of cities absorb more sunlight than the same areas absorbed before humans built the cities. "Hot time, summer in the city."
White roofs would make a substantial difference.
"Our research demonstrates that white roofs, at least in theory, can be an effective method for reducing urban heat," says NCAR scientist Keith Oleson, the lead author of the study. "It remains to be seen if it's actually feasible for cities to paint their roofs white, but the idea certainly warrants further investigation."
The study is slated for publication later this winter in Geophysical Research Letters. It was funded by the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor.
One third of the urban heat island effect could be eliminated by painting all city roofs white (orby using white materials to make the roofs). Okay, so what would it take to remove the other two thirds of the effect?
Cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change because they are warmer than outlying rural areas. Asphalt roads, tar roofs, and other artificial surfaces absorb heat from the Sun, creating an urban heat island effect that can raise temperatures on average by 2-5 degrees Fahrenheit (about 1-3 degrees Celsius) or more compared to rural areas. White roofs would reflect some of that heat back into space and cool temperatures, much as wearing a white shirt on a sunny day can be cooler than wearing a dark shirt.
The study team used a newly developed computer model to simulate the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed or reflected by urban surfaces. The model simulations, which provide scientists with an idealized view of different types of cities around the world, indicate that, if every roof were entirely painted white, the urban heat island effect could be reduced by 33 percent. This would cool the world's cities by an average of about 0.7 degrees F, with the cooling influence particularly pronounced during the day, especially in summer.
I'm thinking white streets would get us part of the way there. Is it possible to develop a whiter concrete? Would such a concrete make streets too bright at mid day?
The extent of the urban heat effect on rural temperature monitoring stations that cease to be rural when economic development occurs around them is a problem with studies that attempt to track long term temperature changes. This problem became an issue in an important case of researchers accused of misrepresenting data from Chinese temperature monitoring stations (and see here for more details). Those two articles from The Guardian in England are worth a read.
Go crazy for fish so you don't just go crazy.
Individuals at extremely high risk of developing psychosis appear less likely to develop psychotic disorders following a 12-week course of fish oil capsules containing long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, according to a report in the February issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
"Early treatment in schizophrenia and other psychoses has been linked to better outcomes," the authors write as background information in the article. "Given that subclinical psychotic symptoms may predict psychotic disorder and psychosis proneness in a population may be related to the rate of psychotic disorder, intervention in at-risk individuals holds the promise of even better outcomes, with the potential to prevent full-blown psychotic disorders."
Check for whether you carry 100 potentially dangerous genes for prospective parents.
Counsyl, a Stanford startup based in Redwood City, CA, has developed a genetic test for prospective parents that determines their risk for passing more than 100 different genetic diseases on to their child. The test, which costs $349 and is already covered by some major insurers, could rapidly expand preconception screening for rare inherited conditions.
Here is a map of 100 medical centers offering this test.
You can bet that the list of testable genetic diseases will grow each year and the general usefulness of pre-pregnancy genetic screening will grow along with the list of testable genes.
The big recent cost declines for genetic testing and genetic sequencing don't just make a test such as this cheaper. Lower costs also enable scientists to engage in much larger scale searches for biologically significant genetic variants. As a result the number of known ways that genetic variants cause human differences is going to grow by orders of magnitude in the next 10 years.
Most (all?) of these genetic variants mentioned above only cause disease if inherited from both parents. Test results for a couple can influence their decision on whether to start a pregnancy naturally or via IVF with pre-implantation genetic diagnosis or whether to avoid reproduction entirely. If you are thinking about making a baby then $349 to assess your genetic risks seems like a small price to pay as compared to the total costs (which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars) to raise a child to adulthood.
Looking down the line 10 or 20 years I expect to see online dating services match people up based on avoidance of shared harmful recessive genes. Searchers for Mr. and Mrs. Right will get steered toward prospective mates with whom they can pretty safely make babies.
Faster tree growth in eastern US forests in recent years.
Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study to be published the week of Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change.
For more than 20 years forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland. The plots range in size, and some are as large as 2 acres. Parker's research is based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, 26 miles east of the nation's capital.
Parker's tree censuses have revealed that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. He and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow Sean McMahon discovered that, on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.
If this trend continues the amount of biomass tied up in these forests will continue to increase.
The researchers suspect higher temperatures, longer growing seasons, and more CO2 (which is nutritious for a plant) as causes.
It was not enough to document the faster growth rate; Parker and McMahon wanted to know why it might be happening. "We made a list of reasons these forests could be growing faster and then ruled half of them out," said Parker. The ones that remained included increased temperature, a longer growing season and increased levels of atmospheric CO2.
During the past 22 years CO2 levels at SERC have risen 12%, the mean temperature has increased by nearly three-tenths of a degree and the growing season has lengthened by 7.8 days. The trees now have more CO2 and an extra week to put on weight. Parker and McMahon suggest that a combination of these three factors has caused the forest's accelerated biomass gain.
Ecosystem responses are one of the major uncertainties in predicting the effects of climate change. Parker thinks there is every reason to believe his study sites are representative of the Eastern deciduous forest, the regional ecosystem that surrounds many of the population centers on the East Coast. He and McMahon hope other forest ecologists will examine data from their own tree censuses to help determine how widespread the phenomenon is.
Some plants benefit from more CO2 because they open their stomata to let in CO2 for shorter periods of time. This reduces moisture loss. Of course, if warming causes a drought in an area then the net effect on plant growth from warming will be negative.
As we age we sleep less without an increase in sleepiness.
WESTCHESTER, Ill. — A study in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal SLEEP suggests that healthy older adults without sleep disorders can expect to have a reduced "sleep need" and to be less sleepy during the day than healthy young adults.
Results show that during a night of eight hours in bed, total sleep time decreased significantly and progressively with age. Older adults slept about 20 minutes less than middle-aged adults, who slept 23 minutes less than young adults. The number of awakenings and the amount of time spent awake after initial sleep onset increased significantly with age, and the amount of time spent in deep, slow-wave sleep decreased across age groups. Yet even with these decreases in sleep time, intensity and continuity, older adults displayed less subjective and objective daytime sleep propensity than younger adults.
Furthermore, two additional nights involving experimental disruption of slow-wave sleep led to a similar response in all age groups. Daytime sleep propensity increased, and slow-wave sleep rebounded during a night of recovery sleep. According to the authors, this suggests that the lack of increased daytime sleepiness in the presence of an age-related deterioration in sleep quality cannot be attributed to unresponsiveness to variations in homeostatic sleep pressure. Instead, healthy aging appears to be associated with reductions in the sleep duration and depth required to maintain daytime alertness.
Does the decline in sleeping come about as a result of a real reduction in the need for sleep? Or does the mechanism that causes us to sleep become more faulty as we age?
Perhaps the brain and the rest of the body are less metabolically active as we age and therefore there's less need for sleep to do repairs and process information gathered during waking hours?
If we made ourselves continue to sleep as much in our later years as we did when we were younger would we derive any benefit?
By age 30 only 12% of a woman's eggs still remain.
A successful collaboration between the Universities of St Andrews and Edinburgh has resulted in a better understanding of how many eggs a woman has in her ovaries (ovarian reserve) from conception to menopause. It is the first time that scientists have ever modelled human ovarian reserve from establishment before birth to menopause around 50 years of age.
By age 40 only 3% remain. The odds of a successful pregnancy at that point therefore are small to none.
Tom Kelsey, a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Computer Science at St Andrews, said, "Previous models have looked at the decline in ovarian reserve, but not at the dynamics of ovarian reserve from conception onwards. Our model shows that for 95% of women, by the age of 30 years, only 12% of their maximum ovarian reserve is present, and by the age of 40 years only 3% remains.
They find no evidence for stem cells that can make more eggs.
"Furthermore our model provides no evidence for the presence of stem germ cells in the ovary that could increase the number of eggs present in the ovary and delay the menopause."
Hollywood starlets having twins in their 40s are almost all using donor eggs.
Going forward the generation of new eggs from stem cells will certainly become possible some day. But when? My guess is it will even become preferable since future techniques for modifying genes in the stem cells will allow people to eliminate genetic defects and also combine the most designed genetic features from all their chromosomes (and beyond) into a single haploid egg. The same will be done with male sperm. Then the rate of human evolution will accelerate orders of magnitude over the current already fast rate of human evolution.
Global temperatures over the last 10 years haven't risen as fast climate models predicted based on rising CO2. A new report might explain this result: a decline in water vapor appears to have slowed the warming.
A decrease in water vapor concentrations in parts of the middle atmosphere has contributed to a slowing of Earth’s warming, researchers are reporting. The finding, they said, offers part of the explanation for a string of years with relatively stable global surface temperatures.
Anyone know what mechanism might be responsible for the changes in water vapor reported in this study? Any reason to expect a continuation or reversal in the water vapor decline?
Stratospheric water vapor concentrations decreased by about 10% after the year 2000. Here, we show that this acted to slow the rate of increase in global surface temperature over 2000 to 2009 by about 25% compared to that which would have occurred due only to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. More limited data suggest that stratospheric water vapor probably increased between 1980 and 2000, which would have enhanced the decadal rate of surface warming during the 1990s by about 30% compared to estimates neglecting this change.
Will the decline in water vapor continue or reverse?
Note how a recent NASA announcement about record temperatures shows several of the latest 12 years all having about the same temperature. That's not an upward trend. The report above suggests why.
WASHINGTON -- A new analysis of global surface temperatures by NASA scientists finds the past year was tied for the second warmest since 1880. In the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year on record.
Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade because of a strong La Nina that cooled the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to a near-record global temperatures as the La Nina diminished, according to the new analysis by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. The past year was a small fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest on record, putting 2009 in a virtual tie with a cluster of other years --1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 -- for the second warmest on record.
If the water vapor stays at current levels then rising CO2 likely will cause a resumption in average air temperatures.
I am in the process of reading more about climate science. Anyone have suggested reading? I'm not looking for political diatribes or books about the politics of climate change. I'd like to develop a better understanding of climate science.
Update: The key question in my mind about this report: Did warming cause the decrease in water vapor in the stratosphere? Or is it coincidental. To put it more succinctly: Was the decrease in stratospheric water vapor a negative feedback of global warming? If you want to predict the future of the climate you have know all the major feedbacks and predict their future behavior. NOTE: I fixed this. changed "increase" to "decrease" in this paragraph.
